Comment by purpleflame1257
19 hours ago
There's a real hole here at Q3. A critical breakpoint here is sub 16-GB cards, which covers the 5080, 5070 Ti, 5060ti, and several other cards from this generation and the last. It would be instructive to see where the quality knee is.
Running Q3 on my AMD RX 9070XT. 32k context and 32/TPS. Apart from the context window preventing it from doing any large tasks, this thing is seriously powerful. I could probably push it to 64k context. Local open models are the future, and I am definitely getting a more powerful card. Very fun!
9070XT operator here: I'm using llama.cpp with the same model and quant and I'm getting 87,000 for my context limit. I tried the Unsloth models but they lowered it to around 30-40K so I went back to upstream.
I'm on Linux and using some sort of unholy mess of ROCM libraries that I don't understand.
Could you comment more on how you set this up? I have a mostly idle 9070XT I use for gaming, and I was considering using it with the newer local open models. Many thanks.
I got Qwen3.8-27B running on my RX 9070 XT by setting up AMD’s ROCm 7.14/TheRock runtime for gfx1201 and adding the required HIP/LLVM paths to Windows. The official llama.cpp ROCm build detected the card correctly, but kept crashing with 0xC0000005 while loading the model, so I switched to the Windows Vulkan build of llama.cpp instead, which worked reliably.
I’m running Qwen3.8-27B-Unleashed UD-Q3_K_XL, which is a ~12.3 GiB Q3 quant, fully offloaded to the 16 GB 9070 XT. I disabled the vision projector to save VRAM and use one inference slot, Flash Attention, Q4 KV cache, --fit off, and --ctx-checkpoints 0. I’m running it with a 64K context window. The AMD driver also needs to be recent enough for ROCm 7.14; I targeted Adrenalin 26.6.4 or newer.
What are you offloading to ram (or even CPU)? I’m using a 9080 (not XT) and having trouble with context/token rates
I’m running Qwen3.8-27B-Unleashed UD-Q3_K_XL, which is a ~12.3 GiB Q3 quant, fully offloaded to the 16 GB 9070 XT. I disabled the vision projector to save VRAM and use one inference slot, Flash Attention, Q4 KV cache, --fit off, and --ctx-checkpoints 0. I’m running it with a 64K context window. The AMD driver also needs to be recent enough for ROCm 7.14; I targeted Adrenalin 26.6.4 or newer.
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Running Q3 on 5060ti with 64k context. It runs great
There is an interesting new dynamic 3 bit quantisation I have been meaning to test:
https://huggingface.co/ISTA-DASLab/Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-GGUF
Luke of Luke’s Dev Lab on YouTube had a look at it. It seems to outperform the typical 3-bit quantisation but whether it outperforms the new Unsloth dynamic I don’t know.
Q3 XL and Q3 XS are the two I'm trying to decide on
You might want to test this new dynamic GGUF:
https://huggingface.co/ISTA-DASLab/Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-GGUF
(I don’t know much about it, just saw a YouTube video about it last night)
Another one to try:
https://huggingface.co/Jackrong/Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-GGUF
Runs the 3bit model faster than the 2bit one runs on my old-ass card. Can’t vouch for its intelligence yet, but i suspect whatever loss in smarts it takes is made up for by the extra resolution.
I have a 5080, three OpenAI Pro token resets, and I’m on paternity leave. Astra seems pretty clever. Maybe I’ll give it a task.